


how the dead walk

by cosmoscorpse



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canon Major Character Death, Gen, and uh. thanos aftermath i guess, death of the author babey, playing fast and loose with canon, space murder sister dynamics, split timeline between immediately after gotg2 and during iw, why didnt nebula go to vormir?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-28
Updated: 2018-07-28
Packaged: 2019-06-17 12:37:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15461535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmoscorpse/pseuds/cosmoscorpse
Summary: When Nebula is young—When Nebula is young, and first faces the girl (who will be her sister) — when Nebula is young, and firstloses, Thanos her father, who plucked her from a place she will cease to remember, in time, takes her spine, and replaces it with steel.She faces the girl (her sister), again, and again, and again.Bits of her go missing, and go missing, and go missing.And are replaced.And for a while she hates the girl (who has become her sister) for it.





	how the dead walk

**Author's Note:**

> “My mother forbad us to walk backwards. That is **how the dead walk** , she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. _They are victims of love, many of them._ ” 
> 
> —anne carson

The Stone is on Vormir.

  
  


When Nebula is young—

When Nebula is young, and first faces the girl (who will be her sister) — when Nebula is young, and first  _ loses _ , Thanos her father, who plucked her from a place she will cease to remember, in time, takes her spine, and replaces it with steel.

She faces the girl (her sister), again, and again, and again.

Bits of her go missing, and go missing, and go missing.

And are replaced.

And for a while she hates the girl (who has become her sister) for it.

  
  


She… lingers.

Gamora finds her alone on an upper deck of the Ravager ship, looking out at stars. She sighs out long and then comes to sit quiet beside her. Nebula spares her sister furtive glances, and Gamora doesn’t look at her at all - except for one long, hard stare at Nebula’s left hand, braced against her knee. It hasn’t been organic since they were, the both of them, twelve years old. The component itself is new to the both of them. 

The silver metal of it shines, fine inner workings humming away. They do not speak, and the silence stretches - not  _ comfortable _ , perhaps, but familiar.

Gamora is the one to break the silence - she sets down a bottle between them, and two small, mismatched glasses after it. The contents swill, sticking and streaking messy down the insides of the glass, and Nebula sees on looking the corner of her mouth ticking upward, wry. 

“Nonian wine,” she says, by way of explanation. “Rotgut. Peter and Kraglin found a case of it in the hold - and  _ now _ they’re conducting what Peter calls a Ravager wake.”

Nebula jerks her chin in acknowledgement. 

Gamora blows out another sigh, smaller this time and paired with her shoulder jumping up in a shrug. “I’d prefer some quiet, right now.”

“So be quiet,” Nebula says, thinking her sister is sparing many words for a simple sentiment. Gamora laughs, and uncorks the bottle, and pours a finger of the wine into each glass. Takes one for herself, and leaves Nebula to decide what to do with the second.

Gamora doesn’t ask if Nebula can still drink, or if their father took that small indulgence alongside her arm, alongside her spine, alongside her eye and countless small others. Her sister does not ask - and Nebula hears the question all the same. She takes her glass in hand, little moving parts in the limb moving smooth together, metal clinking on metal. “Mm,” she hums, raising the glass minutely, before knocking the drink back. Her sister follows suit, pours them both another. The liquor smells plum sweet when she takes the time to hold it - roots in like a dredge to a gut memory she’d forgotten she’d had. Warmth in the orchard. 

She breathes deeply, the circuits in her spine whirring, clicking. The metal not as cold as it could be, where it joins up to what’s left of her flesh. 

Gamora raises her glass in a salute, drains it. Nebula follows slower, watches her sister pour herself a third cup. She seems perfectly content to drink in silence, which still leaves Nebula at something of a loss as to why she sought her out. A day ago, and a lifetime before, they were trying to kill each other, and while she feels the shape of the thing between them changing, they haven’t yet had a chance to put words to that change.

Nebula sighs. Holds out her cup for Gamora to top off her drink. “What do you want,” she says, her tone dead neutral from years of practice.

Gamora won’t meet her eyes, and Nebula isn’t looking, but she does feel her sister stiffen minutely at her side. She sips at her cup, lets the wine burn in her stomach, and waits for Gamora to say her piece.

“You’re not going to stay on with us, are you?” she asks finally, staring deep into the dregs of her cup when Nebula does look her way.

“I can’t,” Nebula says shortly. Gamora bites her lip, jerks her shoulder up in an awkward shrug. (Nebula feels an echo of rage shoot through her, on witnessing that inelegant movement. Her father would have had her  _ upgraded _ , if she’d let her body move in the same fashion - and for Gamora to be here, allowing herself to move  _ sloppily _ without thought to the consequences, here on this too large ship with her stupid Terran and his stupid grating music - no. Nebula cannot stay here.) 

This is a discussion they’ve had. An argument they’ve beaten into familiarity, while Nebula  _ lingered _ .

“You could,” Gamora says quietly, cutting right through the tangle of Nebula’s thoughts. Seeing her right down to the schematics. 

Wordlessly, Nebula tips back the rest of her glass into her mouth.

  
  


“Vormir,” she says, and the pain ceases. “The Stone is on Vormir.”

She is cupping her cheek, running her thumb gently across the skin. A kindness she hasn’t known in an age. Her eyes full of sorrow. Nebula will scream again, - this is not —

She is not  _ worth _ it.  _ Gamora _ — 

The stone is on Vormir. Gamora sells this knowledge, which only she knew, this knowledge which was  _ safeguarded _ — a hefty prize, and for what? Nebula’s life? Half life, or whatever it mat be called? She is nowhere near worth it, but her sister sells one of the stones of creation for her, and dread and love swell within the mechanical hull of her chest in equal measures. Gamora’s thumb is gentle, brushing across her ruined cheekbone.

“You,” Nebula starts, lungs unspun and ragged, “You…”

She does not get the chance to finish. Thanos takes Gamora, and leaves Nebula, and she is left behind with only the feeling of her sister’s hand, gentle in touch, and the love in her eyes when she brokered the bargain.

  
  


“You could,” Gamora says.

  
  


She feigns a weakness, and snaps her guard’s neck. 

Is unsure, in stepping over the body, if he was ever actually alive, or was only a construct made by her father in the image of something - if he was something, made to be something else. She does not think about this. The neck snaps easily under her hands, twist- _ pop _ , and she lurches over the body to the coms. Keys up a code she knows now like the back of her hand; and she’ll have to relearn that, after her father’s care here, but -  _ She _ \- made damn well sure Nebula knew the code to ping the  _ Benetar _ before they parted ways, and she  _ knows _ this.

  
  


They are arguing. This is a familiar thing - easy. 

(Easier, at least, than Gamora’s arms pulling her close. Her moments of flinching animal weakness, when she wants nothing more than to embrace her in return, to  _ stay _ —)

“Do you even care if you fail?” Gamora asks. When Nebula looks her way she has her head tilted, eyes narrowed, looking very much like a bird that’s found a particularly entrancing trinket, her grip tight on Nebula’s arm. Her hair just starting to slip from the intricate braids she put it up in (and Nebula’s fingers twitch with the memory of being all of twelve years, taking Gamora’s directions and braiding that hair in the dead hours of the night when they were meant to be asleep). 

Nebula’s lips twist into something less like a smile, something more like a sneer. 

“You know I have to try,” she counters, voice like flint. She twists her arm away from Gamora’s grip. This, at least, at last, she is familiar with - 

“I don’t  _ care _ ,” her sister says, reaching out again for her hand, “Nebula, we escaped,  _ stay _ with me—”

“You know what he’d do, and you don’t care?” She cannot believe that - not of Gamora, grown soft and beloved, too full of caring for her skin— 

“You’ll  _ die _ ,” her sister says, full of miserable certainty, and Nebula feels wrong-footed again. Off-kilter,  _ again _ , as she has since she had her hands around Gamora’s throat and  _ let go _ . 

She has lingered too long.

  
  


The Stone is —

  
  


(The code to ping  _ Benetar _ . The Stone is on Vormir.

The code to ping  _ Benetar _ , and tell them - no.

The Stone is on Vormir, but her father will be going—)

So she tells Mantis, when Mantis picks up the comm line, to meet her on Titan. 

“Where are you going?” Mantis asks, “Nebula, where will you be going?” and she must be ragged, must be  _ ruined _ , if this child can see her spinning across the thready comm line, the vast distances of space. Nebula forces her whole hand to steady. The components in her ruined hand continue clicking slowly back into place. Quill is shouting in the background of the line - asking for —

Her father’s ship is cold. It howls with its own wind. She shivers, cloaked in the shade of his throne room, and she tells Mantis, “Meet me on Titan,” again. Cuts the line just as Quill’s frantic face presses into frame.

She has hours. She takes a stasis field, and a ship.

  
  


“You should have killed me,” she hisses to Thanos, on Titan, her blade glancing off his skin. He snarls - she will kill him, she will, she promised -

“It would have been a waste of parts,” Thanos her father says, contempt dripping from his words.

Nebula thinks,  _ I am  _ exactly _ what you made of me _ , and she screams and brings her blade back down.

  
  


They are arguing, and this is a familiar thing, but —

She has lingered too long - and her sister has told her a fatal truth. The silence settles about the two of them like twin shrouds.

Gamora’s mouth snaps shut, her breath drawn in shaking, her fists clenching at her sides. Nebula is cold with the knowledge. 

Her sister, and her sister alone, knows where the Stone is.

Knew. Not alone. She supposes they are two, now.

“You shouldn’t have told me that,” Nebula says quietly, in the vast empty space of the Ravager hold.

“ _ Nebula _ ,” her sister says the name like a supplication.  _ Stay _ , she does not say. Nebula closes her eyes, breathes out, holds her hand out to Gamora. A moment passes, two, and then Gamora slips her hand into the grip. Gamora’s hand is trembling. Perhaps Nebula’s is as well.

“Thank you,” Nebula says to her sister, opening her eyes. She will not fail, now. She  _ cannot _ . “You should not have told me that, but thank you.”

Gamora’s lip trembles. She suddenly drags Nebula by the hand into a loose embrace, her arms looping around her surprised frame. “Kill him,” she says, her voice cold. She presses her lips, lightning quick, to Nebula’s cheek. She releases Nebula from the embrace, steps back. She is letting her go, and Nebula - resents this - has lingered too long.

“I will,” Nebula promises, feeling hollow, turning to leave.

  
  


The Stone is on Vormir. 

  
  


She finds Gamora at the bottom of a cliff, on Vormir. 

Nebula finds Gamora at the bottom of a cliff, her life spilled from her imperfect vessel, and Nebula’s throat opens with a grief that is a foreign world. That is unknown to her.

Her body is — Nebula is no healer to begin with, and Gamora is past healing regardless. So Nebula gathers the one she’s chosen as sister up in her arms and she carries it to her ship and she activates the stasis field and she calls it salvageable. and she calls it enough.

  
  


In her grief, she goes to Titan.

**Author's Note:**

> hey folks, thanks for reading!
> 
> i've been struggling with this fic for a fair minute, and i think i'm finally happy with how it ended up, and i hope you are too. and who knows, there may or may not be more marvel fic from me in the wings - lord knows infinity war fucked me up well enough for it. 
> 
> as always, i'm over @ [matredaen](http://matredaen.tumblr.com) on tumblr; come visit!!!


End file.
